The last time I was at my boyfriend's parents' house I helped myself to some apples from their tree and this is what I did with them. I had planned to make this pie for them but it looks like we won't see them before the apples go bad.

The crust is made from the dough I almost always have in the freezer. When I find cream cheese at a great price I make the dough (from a recipe I found on the Epicurious site ages ago), divide the dough into two, stick each half in a freezer bag, chuck it in the freezer, and just take it out whenever I need it. It thaws in about two hours. To speed up the thawing process you can just slice off bits as they thaw. Half the recipe is a perfect size for a bottom crust. It rolls out and repairs very easily and isn't as fragile as other doughs I've tried. The only down side is that the edge shrinks quite a bit as it's cooking. This is not the dough recipe to use if you like the thick fork-pressed or finger-ruffled edge crust edge.

The crust recipe is just 1 cup or 1 brick of cream cheese, 1/2 a cup of soft butter, and a cup of flour.

The pie filling I just winged based on what I remembered from the last time I made apple pie years ago and from the experience I have making the pumpkin pie I love so much. I cut up enough apples to make what I thought would be a mound in the pie shell about twice as tall as the pie plate. I used my apple corer to speed things up and cut the slices into pieces that were no more than about a centimeter thick. As I cut the apples and tossed them into a big bowl I splashed them with a bit of lemon juice. Then I sprinkled on a few tablespoons of flour, grated in about a tsp of fresh nutmeg (so much more flavourful than prepackaged!), sprinkled on one or two tsp of cinnamon, broke up about half a cup of brown sugar over the apples, then stirred to get all the slices coated.

All that went into the crust, then I trimmed off the excess and dabbed water around the edge. I rolled out another round of dough, sliced it into even strips, laid the strips over the pie in one direction first and then the other, lightly pressing the top dough to the bottom dough. I put a piece of tinfoil very loosely over the whole pie and put it in the oven at 425 for about 15 minutes, then reduced the temp to 350 and let it cook for an hour, taking the tinfoil off around the 40 minute mark. It was hard to resist but I let the pie set for about 20 minutes before digging in to give all the liquids time to gel. The house smelled great and the taste buds were happy!